Expectations

It's easy to get caught up in this topic. From others, from within, from family, from society, from Religion, from Pop culture, expectations are everywhere. The only set within our control are the self-derived, of course. I have no further to look than this Blog for evidence of that fact.

In the beginning of this here Bloggerooski, expectation was a daily entry, at least on my Days Off from my Real Job. That's admirable, and doomed to fail. The first time adversity hits, life happens, whatever, all of a sudden we have Failed in our own expectation. I set myself up for that one, Big Time. So, in the future I will try to shy away from such public pronouncements of intent, if only to keep my shame private.

Just kidding, if I wanted everything to stay purely private, we wouldn't be having this one-sided conversation right now, would we? Here is a good example of the Solution to failing our expectations, with a few caveats: this doesn't work with Serious screw ups. If somebody got hurt, if laws were broken, if restitution has to be paid in some way, well forget the following advice. Its out of context: in the above disastrous failures of expectation, I bet others', and maybe a lot of others' expectations were also failed. Ha ha.

See Fig One below, representing the before and the after.

I figured out something important about how my printer works. As a result, better, cleaner images are produced, and 18 cards per sheet instead of 16. A big day! Yay.... right? Until you figure in the past three days I spent making sheets, (and the days and days before that) not making Blog posts (obviously), and really kicking butt doing the Wrong Process. I guess the decks can be used, sure, all 32 of them, but they are supposed to be Prototypes, after all. Precursors and representative of the future item. And honestly, they were not nearly up to the standard or Expectation I had set for them in my mind.

So what have I learned here? If I had followed my expectation for myself and this Blog and community-building, I would never had wasted all of that time making sheets. If I had not wasted all of that time, my Wife wouldn't have taken a closer look at what I was doing and commented she thought they could look a little nicer, which got my investigating, which got me to the new better process.

Be ready to let go completely of your expectations, especially if they were misguided in the first place. Just let that stuff go. I might use those hundreds of sheets for cutting practice, but other than that, too bad. It is in the past.

What is most important, going forward and continuously, is the real question. I hope the quality of these posts will likewise outstrip the quantity of them, and that they will not sit in this webspace like so many substandard cardstock sheets, destined only to be cut and DisCarded (couldn't resist).

If I had focused first on the improving of the process and product, I could have saved a lot of time in redo's. That is the lesson I am taking from my humbling and consistent inability to live up to my own expectation, and provides the silver-lining of a post topic. See ya.